Jonathan Kay: The inhuman Olympic spirit as seen through Jaehyouk Sa

The inhuman Olympic spirit as seen through Jaehyouk Sa

For me, the most memorable moment of the 2012 Olympic games came on Thursday, when South Korean weightlifter Jaehyouk Sa made his second attempt at lifting 162 kg. With the bar already over his head, but before he’d completed the snatch, a cracking sound could be heard. It was Sa’s elbow falling apart, and he collapsed to the ground, along with the bar.

The accident may end the 27-year-old Sa’s career. He’s been under the knife many times before, including two shoulder surgeries. But each time, he’s returned. Since his teenage years, he’s dedicating his life to lifting things over his head. That’s what he does. He’s literally a machine, a sort of short-range cargo elevator made out of flesh and bone.

The immediate aftermath of Sa’s injury was telling. As he lay on the floor, receiving medical attention, two flunkies jumped out from the wings and unfurled a large 2012 London Olympics banner in front of the stage, like those tarps they put over fallen racehorses as they’re being euthanized on the track. Or the “Construction crew at work — please use stairs” fold-out sign you see in front of a broken escalator, which is more or less what Sa is — or was.

The Olympics are branded as a celebration of human achievement. Yet specimens such as Jaehyouk Sa show us how inhuman the spectacle has become. They are in the business of exceeding the engineering design limits of the human body. That’s why so many athletes dope up: It’s all about building a better machine, at any moral or physical cost.

As the Chinese have discovered, machines operate at peak efficiency when they are freed from the distraction of family. Last week, National Post reporter Bruce Arthur told the sad story of gold-medal-winning Chinese diver Wu Minxia, who might be described as an Olympic orphan. Like most elite Chinese athletes, she was taken from her home when she was a child — as soon as she demonstrated elite ability — and has been raised as a ward of the Athletic State.

When her grandparents died, she learned the news a year later — from newspapers. “Our daughter doesn’t belong to us any more,” Wu’s parents told Agence France-Press.

To Westerners, this may seem like an inhuman warping of the “Olympic spirit.” In fact, it is its purest distillation. What better way to make athletes ‘faster, higher, stronger’ than by stripping out every emotional impulse that distracts them from those goals? And since the Olympics are organized along essentially tribal lines, with each athlete being branded to this or that nation, who better to perform that distraction-stripping function than the tribal leadership — in this case, the People’s Republic of China?

It was not always thus. A century ago, Olympians were part-time athletes — just like the ancient Greeks. The staffing of Canadian and American basketball teams, for instance, typically was decided by which players could get a few weeks off from their full-time jobs at offices and farms. But just as Wal-Mart killed main street, and Amazon.com killed the corner book store, the Olympics became a ruthless cult of specialization, with every athlete attended to by a cortege of trainers, dieticians and doctors, each taking their own particular wrench and screwdriver to the meat machines in unitards and track suits.

This is the farthest thing from a celebration of human potential, except in the crudest quantitative sense of kilograms and hundredths of a second. The miracle of the human body lies in its versatility, intelligence and capacity for improvisation (characteristics that admittedly are on display in such Olympic sports as tennis, soccer and volleyball). As machines, we are less graceful and precise than birds and flying insects; far weaker than beasts of burden; far slower than cats (and even rodents). The intense specialization that comes with modern Olympic training, turning the fabulously multi-functioned human body and brain into a machine that does just one thing a million times over, actually erases the magic of human specialness.

And it does so at huge expense, because the all-encompassing nature of modern training methods crowds out every other form of personal development. What does Jaehyouk Sa know how to do except lift things over his head — or perhaps teach other people to lift things over their heads?

Yes, a precious few Olympians can make a career giving corporate motivational speeches or appearing on cereal boxes. But for the rest of them, athletic life ends with some metaphorical version of a tarp on the racetrack. Only then, in their 20s or 30s, do their real lives as human beings begin.